The present invention generally relates to computing networks, and more particularly relates to network management data.
A key problem in systems management is reconciliation of data gathered for the maintenance and management of large information technology (IT) systems. Typically, the data gathered by systems management tools for a particular entity (software or hardware entity) is associated with an identifier that uniquely identifies the corresponding entity. This identifier is usually generated automatically by using heuristic rules. For example, the Internet Protocol address assigned to a server or the DNS name of a server can be used as an identifier. This practice works well as long as the IT system is relatively stable so that these automatically generated identifiers remain consistent over a large time period.
However, when the subsystems or entities migrate (e.g., changing versions of a software, changing physical location of a software component, changing hardware, running an application stack in a virtual environment, etc.), heuristic rules (e.g., resource types and naming properties in CMDBf Specification developed by a six-company consortium BMC, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, and Microsoft) usually produce different identifiers for the same logical entity before and after migration. This creates a problem of information reconciliation since without any reconciliation, to the system management software it seems that certain entities have disappeared and others have appeared when in fact only the identifiers have changed.